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up to 20 degrees higher than today at the northernmost latitudes... the global sea level was about 25 meters higher

I bet some inland Canadians/Scandinavian countries wouldn't mind, and they're not the only ones. There's lots of money to be made by letting climate change create havoc: insurance companies get more business when there's uncertainty; uncertainty gives speculators more volatility to work with; defense contractors have more food riots to quell; politicians get to make more promises to solve the new problems; and corporations get more grants, bailouts and subsidies to help solve them. First-world politicians get to use FUD to gain a bit more control over the populace, and the harsher climates help them avoid that dreaded post-scarcity economy just a little bit longer. Break enough windows and people won't be able to buy a society that no longer 'needs' the robber barons and demagogues.

The real reason America has to catch up on the 'patent gap' is not so we'll be the most competitive, but so we can siphon as much money as possible from other countries' businesses. More patents means more lawsuit money coming into the country to offset the trade deficit. Gotta win at every statistical metric fathomable, dontcha know.

That explains why many news organizations are removing the ability to comment from their sites: because it was undermining the effectiveness of the favored propaganda they pass along as 'news'. Remember kids, journalistic bias is all about WHICH propaganda you decide to go to press with.

However, this wouldn't fool the NK government, if they're not actually responsible for the hack, because they're totalitarian enough to KNOW they weren't responsible. In which case, who is this 'leak' intended to fool? Rhetorical question, it's the American public.

Alternate option: NK was responsible but the confidential sources are proud enough of their jobs to want to toot the NSA's horn, and don't think NK can actually do anything to stop the hacking, even if they broadly know how they were hacked. Evidence of the Sony hack was found in a counter-hacking performed after the Sony hack, probably using already-existing implants, or was only examined after the Sony hack. The unusual degree of interest that Obama had in the Sony hack suggests that the NSA might've been given an unusual degree of interest in the matter as well, so it's plausible they would've found something beyond what the legal authorities would've.

I imagine once word of this gets out to people in certain African nations infected by Ebola, it'll get distilled into "bats are threatening our survival" and lead to wholesale slaughter of bats. Something similar happened with cats mistakenly being associated with the Black Death. This will then lead to a surge in mosquito populations, which will then lead to a surge in malaria cases, which will likely kill more people than the Ebola outbreaks themselves.

If true, that may help explain why the southern US has more obesity than the north, aside from obvious education/income/cultural factors. It also would imply that global warming would lead to global fattening, which has already been seen.

8k won't be ready for anything any time soon. HDMI 2.0 doesn't even support 8k 30Hz, and few TVs have Displayport. 4k Blurays are taking their time arriving to market, and 50GB arguably won't be enough for 8k without a codec upgrade which would itself require a new disc player. What portion of existing bluray players have old HDMI ports or processors that can't handle 4k content? It's not like 4k TVs are high-margin items anymore -- I saw a nice 50" one at Walmart for $699 a few weeks ago, and there were cheaper ones online. The price has hit rock bottom before there's even the demand for them. Unlike 4k cameras, there are only a couple prototypes of 8k cameras, so almost all content will be rendered CG for a while.

I'd read countless arguments on Slashdot that human eyes can't discern resolution higher than 1080p in a 50" TV over 10 feet or so, before I actually watched a demo 4k TV running 4k content, for about 15 minutes. If you have a 50" TV in your bedroom, 5 feet away from where you're sitting, you can definitely notice a huge improvement in detail. I stepped about 15 feet away and in most scenes it was still usually an obvious, substantial improvement over 1080p.An electronics retailer in Europe held a contest, setting a cordon that people had to stay behind, more than 10 feet away from two televisions, and were asked which was the 4k tv and which was the 1080p. 98% of people correctly guessed which was which. Maybe people asked others who cheated, but it suggests that "most people can't tell" is bullshit. I seem to recall when the Apple retina display claims first came out, a scientist mentioned that humans' actual acuity was about 50% better than what Apple was claiming. It's also worth noting that while a single still retina image may be at a certain DPI, there are psychovisual effects (like depth perception) that can improve the resolution inside the brain, beyond what one retina picks up at one time. The eyes also saccade all the time, which I seem to recall can be interpolated to improve resolution.